A Tokyo District Court has already sided with the man, ruling that Google must remove the offending characters from the results when his name is entered as a such term and that they pay him compensatory damages for the embarrassment this algorithm flub has caused.

Google offers in its defense little more than "that such cases are few and far between, not the result of any human intervention and that data is updated frequently to stay current." Though, it seems worth exploring the possibility that another individual by the same name might in fact have legitimate reasons for those offending terms to be associated with this name. It is unclear whether this had already been ruled out. [TheRegister]